Technical Field
The present invention relates to data center management and, more particularly, to estimating traffic along virtual flows in a multi-tenant data center.
Description of the Related Art
Modern data centers may serve multiple clients with a single device using, for example, virtual machines to host the multiple workloads as if they were on separate hardware. In addition, software defined networking provides network administrators with the ability to dynamically reorganize network resources, creating and reorganizing virtual local area networks (VLANs) and virtual extensible local area networks (VXLANs) on the fly.
However, when multiple different workflows may be transmitted along a single shared physical link, it can be difficult to obtain flow-level information. In a multi-tenant data center, where a single device with a single physical link can host multiple virtual machines and multiple virtual links, it is difficult to break down the utilization of that physical link into the usage of the multiple virtual links.
Existing attempts to find flow-level information focus on three points: improving the collection of performance counters from distributed network devices (e.g., switches and middleboxes) in data centers, scalable data collection systems, and instrumenting virtualization platforms. For example, some solutions make use of additional instrumentation at the hypervisor level to perform packet-level inspection. Such inspection offers accuracy in determining information about the flows on a link, but generally involves significant increases in the cost and complexity of network monitoring.